﻿Vote green ﻿andy brown

We have some tremendous teachers in this country who do a fantastic job despite getting little or no thanks from the Government. Their job is being made much harder by a whole series of ideologically driven attacks on education from people who have little or no experience of actually doing the job. As someone who has actually taught difficult inner city kids and successfully managed some of the most challenging educational services in the country it seems to me that there are ten big things wrong with the Governments have been tackling education:1. The service is constantly being re-organised and changed for no good reason. No child cares whether their school is guided by the elected local authority or the appointed academy governors, yet massive amounts of time and energy have been spent on a bureaucratic change which has no direct impact on teaching and learning.2. Teachers are being told by national government what they should teach their children to interest them. Those who actually teach students understand what they need to learn a lot better than nostalgic Government Ministers who are imposing a clumsy old fashioned curriculum on them.3. Children's success depends mostly upon where their parents can afford to live and consequently how good the local school is. There is little incentive or support for those who teach in inner cities. The pupil premium is too low to make an impact on disadvantage. We are wasting the potential talent of too many of our children.4. Ofsted has ceased to be an independent trusted inspectorate. It finds what the government has paid it to find and its inspections risk becoming meaningless checks of results statistics. 5. There is too little focus on top quality practical vocational education. An apprenticeship is still seen as a second class opportunity compared with University whilst in fact it represents for many a first class route to a good career. 6. We have made University education so expensive that only the wealthy can afford it. £9,000 a year plus living expenses represents debts of up to £50,000. 7. There is little recognition of the value of lifelong learning. We need to combine learning and work more effectively from a young age to make learning more relevant and more fun and we need much more emphasis on helping adults to gain new skills and qualifications and to retrain.8. We are not investing enough in training people to acquire science and technology skills that we need to tackle new challenges we face such as environmental protection. We are training for the past not for the future.9. We have ceased to value our public services and been sold the illusion that we cannot afford to fund them properly. Our economy is not in a mess because we over invested in the public sector. It is a mess because we under controlled highly paid investment bankers in the private sector.10. Too many of our school buildings and far too much of our equipment are not fit for purpose. We have failed to invest properly in training our young people to compete in a world economy.Andy Brown is The Green Candidate for Skipton and Ripon at the General Election in May. He has real practical experience of running educational services well in challenging environments. He taught in inner city colleges for over 20 years before becoming Deputy Principal of Keighley College, Director of Hillsborough College in Sheffield. In each of these roles he improved results, student numbers and finances. He then worked as Executive Director of the Learning and Skills Council in the Black Country before becoming Director of Young People's Learning for Yorkshire and the Humber. He is passionate about protecting and improving education. If you are interested in learning more about Green ideas then follow him on Twitter via @voteandybrown or visit the Skipton and Craven Green Party Website and express your own views on what needs to be done to help your local school or college.